Human's are herbivores

Changed 30-04-2024, 29-04-2025

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Anecdotally, humans are suited to and are better off with such a vegan diet, but cooked gilled wild fish is a lot more digestible than red and other meat.  Traditionally, a Mediterranean diet is considered the best.  In most parts of the world, inland meat intake might be chicken once a year.  Evidence that veganism is right for all of us is in the shape of our teeth, bones and having a long intestine.  There had been a theory that some human blood types were better suited to different diets, but that theory, which had been well-researched, has been superseded.  However, the study still has interesting coincidental evidence, and I suspect grains could be included in the list of things humans should moderate, though grains are not an issue for me.  This is the link, it does not work now;  http://www.ion.ac.uk/information/onarchives/eatrightbloodtype

   

 Southborough Café there are plenty of variations possible to make a nice vegan lunch.  They are careful to apply a vegan request properly but there is not enough custom to stock dairy free milk to make custard for the apple crumble.  Yatra Café (Indian street food) in Southborough, where I live, has many vegan options.  The Pig and Porter microbrewery, High Brooms beers are lovely and are all vegan. 

The diseases of the wealthy from eating red meat and red wine, such as gout, are now supplemented by diseases of modern processed food and intensive production, vehicle fumes, as well as the benefits of the supply of better quality vegetables to the cities.  Better health services, depending on the country, for some or for all, alternatively, traditional living, food and the use of natural medicine also work.  A mediaeval banquet as seen in the films with beef of old England, game, wine, beer, fruit and spirit was the food of kings, but they also learnt to eat their fruit and vegetables as a necessary penance or encouraged as natural pleasures.  Eating wild berries and fruit is a pleasure that seems to have gone out of fashion, perhaps displaced by sweeties and smart devices?  Sweets were popular with Mum, perhaps starting from her wartime ration, but never interested Dad much.  They were a sort of gift to the first world after WW2, but they then became normal rather than a treat even though fruit and veg became more available as well.  Parts of the UK live on a lot of animal product's and to even get vegetables on a plate in the Midlands is a difficult request still, and even if your chosen item is a vegetable dish, such as eating out in Birmingham (I was told this, as an old truism before I started contract working near Birmingham and found it still very true).  An anecdote on Facebook of parents and grandparents who live mostly on meat in the Midlands. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypEaGQb6dJk

The conventional anthropological view is that humans descended from apes and that fire and meat-eating distinguished us from our ape ancestors.  Furthermore, the theory is that the brain developed from hunting, although tool making is now well established not a human differentiation.  There is more than an element of truth that humans left their passive, plant-eating "Garden of Eden" for a more aggressive life, fighting, killing and building cities.  In the film "2001 A Space Odyssey" - Chapter 1, Dawn of Man, the author Arthur C Clarke was a science fiction (prediction) writer, but this view was more in keeping with the 1960s when it was written and is not wrong, but only part of our anthropology.  Plant-eating people live a very easy life in the lowland with lush vegetation, than those living in higher arid land where life is a struggle (From Eden to Ethiopia, Radio 4, 1988).  Change occurs in our case is not due to the small population under pressure, but is a consequence of the opportunity to exploit, manufacture and produce cheap factory meat and other food for people living in the first world.  We greatly overproduce and waste food.  Food that many people ate before World War One was often poor, and the conscripts joined in poor health.  The pressure led to popular support for Communism in the UK between the two world wars, when the starvation of post-World War I Europe led to the rise of Hitler and WW2.  Hence the cold war was initiated very soon after WW2 turning on our great ally the USSR, and crippling it financially eventually 40 years later rather than have the idea Communism spread. 

The common thing in the post-war period with all the allies was that meat was put on the tables, and although fingers were pointed at what the Soviet Union did not have, they did have meat at every meal, just the same as we did, if we and they chose.  Russian visitors who spoke in Tunbridge Wells in the 1980s also said they were very supportive of Mrs Thatcher. 

  

Tunbridge Wells is my home town and has many places, such as Ruby's of London, which is a 100% vegan tea and cake café is popular with both vegan and non-vegan customers.  The Bakery features the use of traditional recipes, so there is no milk powder, soya, or bread mixes used; a number of breads, one pastry, and the breakfast pictured has no processed foods. 

Sankeys' offers include banana blossom fish and chips and Sunday lunch.  Zorba Turkish restaurant.  Charles Angles Kitchen need your financial donations, stock surplus food and the café menu is varied.

   

The link below states a fairly well-accepted view that humans came from plants and vegetables, plus some insect-eating ancestors.  It also says the similarities in the stomach and intestine with humans, apes, gorillas and monkeys are very close - Viva (an organisation promoting veganism) goes further in the anatomical comparison.  An article in December 2015 on Radio 4 said that monkey, ape, gorilla and human digestive systems are identical if you dissected each you would not know which was which but that there are differences in relative sizes of each part in humans from different parts of the world correlating with there diet as well as with the other common ancestor species.   Several YouTube video documentaries on anthropology, some of our ancestors had larger brains than us, Neanderthals were more passive.  In the time that human ancestors lived and cross-bred, cities and agriculture may have formed and reverted to simpler living many times. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwQWNpgdP6U

https://viva.org.uk/health/the-evolution-of-a-vegan/

https://www.andrew-lohmann.me.uk/photographs/guatemala-2007

 

   Waitrose promoted this really lovely vegan almond and cherry slice for 50p, then 60p for a number of years, but despite how very nice it was, cheaper than other cakes in their café, it was eventually withdrawn.  Tonbridge, Daily Rice, I am left pleased with what I had all day, and do not regret it later, which often happens when eating out.  There is no food marked vegan you need to ask.  The Tonbridge vegan fair is run by The Fat Carrot.

My parents came from comfortably working families, and neither of them were vegan.  Mum lived on fruit, vegetables and mostly root vegetables, lentils and beans in Scotland, although Mum complained they did not have the range of food my father had in Kent, but she was very happy with the diet she had been brought up with, plus milk and a moderate amount of fish and meat.  Whereas my father's family lived in South East England, on a lot of fruit, vegetables and products from the chickens in the garden, plus meat and good quality fish.  The period after World War 2 until 1979 is called the post war political consensus where things were given back to the people, Americans had big gas guzzling cars, inch thick steaks filling the plate, they do less of that now but British now have big cars lots of things and by comparison the wealth gap is much greater than it had been until 1980 when the political consensus ended. 

It turns out the gift was not a gift but more intensive exploitation, war and a skewing of the money system where those who do the work all of the world for us don't catch up in earnings.  1950 is identified when climate change gases started to become significant.  Breathing issues were also an issue, but I don't know how much of it was attributed to be caused by pollen, then, I think a lot? 

Showing a preference for a big steak, cheap burger and chips, and avoiding that lovely Waitrose vegan slice is surely about choosing to be seen consuming what is acceptable rather than what is nice.  I did eventually learn to eat meat, and I liked milk, evidently, they were learnt and had become cravings.  Fruit juices are bad, whereas fruit is the best food you can eat, so eat it all the time when it is ripe.  I never liked Coca-Cola, it no doubt triggers the sweet bad water instinctive revulsion, unless conditioned to like it.  You never know until you try is so true, and I found out tea was very much nicer without milk.  Milk and sugar make tea really horrible, but Chai is a different drink, I don't like that either! 

Photo of Tonbridge Castle and River Medway, January 2016 - Camera: Canon IXUS60.

But gorillas eat a lot of grasses, and their digestion is comparable to a cow's in fermenting in an enlarged bowl rather than in a stomach as a cow does.  Otherwise, more and more evidence shows that veganism covers everything a human needs, not as super-foods popularly stated, but is just food.  The link below expresses an underlying view that is at variance with this view. 

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/

I am told that now, in 2025, eating vegan food out has declined by 30%, although I also read that veganism continues to increase.  I've always hated bullying, war and unkindness, but observe, in myself being oblivious of it in ways I was brought up and very aware in other ways.  For example, as a boy but now accustomed to eating meat, I was told that cows moo for two weeks day and night after their calves are taken from them, but it was significant enough when my mum told me to remember the fact.

   

There are many vegan groups, some bring food to share, some meet in vegan cafés such as this one.  Fortify café in Maidstone is now closed, unfortunately.  The Maidstone and Canterbury groups both run a vegan fair about once a year.  The Skull Bar was vegan (The Rainbow Skull), got very in debt, was going to close, but was renamed, added meat to a reduced menu and is recovering from debt, has four vegan items plus extras on their menu and has a Good Food award.  Some of their beers are vegan, and they are all served in excellent condition.  Indulgence has a few vegan items, pictured cake also has one ice cream and a breakfast.

Here is another perspective based on blood group types of recent humans for the past 50,000 years; Some research suggests that vegetable-only eating humans were buried separately in prehistoric times.  The variance in this perspective and the out of (the jungles of) Africa plant and insect eater view was more like back and forth migration than what sounds like an organised migration and pressures of colder climates.  So the difference in blood helps with different foods, but there are no basic physical differences.

• Type O are the hunter's type and is better suited to meat eating. 

• Type A is suited to vegetable eating. 

• Type B has adaptations for milk and wheat. 

• Type AB is a combination of both A and B. 

There are plenty of web links on blood types and their correlation with food and the nature of those humans. 

 

Pictures of the Cumbria kitchen, St Leonards-on-Sea, the owner is vegan, lovely not anglicised South American food, with colours, textures and subtle flavours feature.  Lovely cakes.  Kassa Café, a lovely Mediterranean breakfast. 

It turns out that my blood type is A+, not the Hunter type.  I am sensitive to eating meat, and red meat is particularly bad and gives me a very bad headache.  After a long abstinence from milk, I find that hay fever, constipation are greatly reduced, and there are other benefits.  Having said that, the personal observation may also partly be an adverse reaction to the products of intense farming methods.  At a Tunbridge Wells UNA meeting in October 2015, I heard worryingly that the productivity of modern farming is (Barrie Bain, a consultant to the International Fertiliser Industry Association, advising on United Nations affairs).

• Chicken is 2 times the input for a given food output. Vegan groups say the same (Animal Aid). 

• Lamb 4 times, which in the UK mostly roam freely. 

• Beef 7 times.  Animal Aid said this summer (Kent Vegan Fare 2015) that the intensity is not so high and has a figure of 15 times for beef, 

• Goose meat, 100 times.

The world cannot sustain this level of consumption and has already stopped providing people with grass-fed meat and free-living animals as a food source for nearly all people, progressively producing poorer quality food, such as bland factory chicken with spice and seasoning added rather than naturally very spicy wild jungle fowl*.  The world has to be managed sustainably, and consumption must not grow, whether denied or acknowledged, but avoided either way.  The modern culture of home-delivered pizza and the couch potato also leads to less socialising and more information, therefore spun by the media.  This only works for us whilst money is created in London, plus another income from keeping the world in conflict through war. 

The UK is now the biggest arms exporter in the world (Radio 4, in recent years, 2025).

*Radio interview with a British person who had been amazed on a visit to South East Asia how different their wild jungle fowl to our British domestic chicken and turkey. 

 Pictured: Hastings, First in Last Out, the microbrewery's own beers are vegan.  The Bullet Cafe has lovely cakes and flans.  Di Pola make there own ice cream and sorbets, some are vegan.  Vegan Sunday lunch at the Royal Standard and many other places. 

Farming rings a considerable amount out of animals, and this motivates people to mistrust at least and be concerned about what we lose in quality and humanity for achieving such productivity.  The constant pressure on all production to cut corners without compromising appearance, and the legal paperwork, should be called the human race rather than the cliché rat race. 

https://www.andrew-lohmann.me.uk/perspective/motive-and-change/the-amazons-m-c

Personally, I find some meat, and I suspect it is low-standard factory farmed, has a strong stink of urine eye-stinging smell.  This type of meat gives much more severe headache if I eat it.  Cow's milk has a yuckiness in its taste.  I used to refuse to eat meat when I was very young, so Mum and Dad spent a lot of time coaxing me to eat meat.  But I am certain that my reaction was right in that case, but suppressed in later childhood, consequently.  In my adulthood mum told me children know what is right for them, contrary to the outdated but still held view when I was a baby that fat babies are healthier.  I have spoke to other parents of my generation were advised by the NHS to put more weight and to feed there babies with animal products but did not do that and that children grew up to be very athletic. 

Hastings, Mama Geny's is 100% vegan, a menu or buffet, and their desserts are lovely.  Not pictured, Corner House vegan.  Trinity Foods Co-Operative shop (not a café).  Alexandra Park is lovely and also has two cafes with vegan options. 

In discussions on Facebook;

Books have been written on human anthropology, but a view that fire and eating meat gave humans an advantage so that our stomach size could be reduced. "Catching Fire" by Richard Wrangham.  Has been recommended to me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6250132/Catching-Fire-How-Cooking-Made-Us-Human-by-Richard-Wrangham-review.html

In the summary of the book, cooking and eating meat gave humans the genetic opportunity to reduce the amount of body mass taken up by chewing and digesting. 

The blood group type article would coincide with that more recent history case.  Humans moving into colder climates, such as the Inuit, for example, who traditionally lived hard but short lives.  Having said that, there is a path for us back to the Garden of Eden (with tablet computers and mobile phones) or at least the diet that goes with it, but there is no other path on offer that involves the continuation of the amount of pain, consumption and exploration humans cause now.  I found my Blood donor's card turns out that I am A rh D+, whatever that means, but I think it means that I am of the vegan blood group.  But I am not convinced, and neither are many others, it is like most people I have lived with, feeling unwell but not knowing anything else, problems with consuming, animal and wheat.   The problem is compounded by the intensity of production and the greater availability of poorer foods don’t just harm me, but harm everyone and everything. 

 

Bathing Hut café, West St Leonards, pictured, has a wonderful, calming view of the sea with busy Hastings far away, their banana blossom fish and chips and everything they serve is particularly nice but continually changes.  Sunflower Café, Ore Community Centre, one of my bicycles, a Universal, is poorly made with badly fitting cheap parts, but it's a good bike of its type, once those things were fixed, but the café's food is varied and lovely and it is cheap.  There are so many nice places to eat around Hastings. 

Fruit, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds are optimal foods for humans.  I have been working on tuning my senses to my body's needs.  Something my dad coached me on is to learn to like what is right and to not like what is poisonous, for example sweet smell of paint.  But I’d say the skull bars vegan food and beer is bad, but unusually very nice, hence their food awards.  My father did not inherit was somewhat unhappy, although his mum bought him a super by the class of super bicycles which I use, but as a young man, he drank beer and listened to King Oliver, Bessie Smith to cope but eat what was then considered properly.

Another book recommended was Grain Brain.  It apparently says our brains developed with the use of grains.  That makes sense, the group B or AB blood type being more recent than the hunter blood group O. 

A friend also recalled some information about uric acid in meat ... due to the stress of modern killing methods ... meat eaters are, in effect, eating urine.  I can confirm that I do, and I can smell it (cooking meat can make my eyes sting depending on the quality of the meat).  As that friend can also.  And I agree with her that, " But frankly, given the delicious beans and grains and veg", I have cut the quote. 

Hawkwood College, Stroud, Gloucestershire, venue of past VegiVentures Christmas holidays.  VegiVentures has retired. 

Many of the vegan food places have reduced their range or closed since I wrote this blog.  My savings in more ethical unit trusts have been reducing in value, no doubt against warfare investment in recent years.  Such a bad trend, good things are being talked down, and the BBC is pressing the Labour government to spend badly and unethically.  For so long, Conservative or Labour governments only do good things if they don’t get detected.  The only time this was not so was after World War 2, when people had been billeted together, isolated from the media, but talking to each other about welfare and an NHS (my father explained).

 

Having good vegan food, such as I have with VegiVentures I always come away wondering why anyone would want anything else?  Also true of making my own, but I agree that it takes a while to learn, but there are a lot of people who have, and if you join in with a vegan meet-up, you may experience such food.  The kitchen management is a model for any business creating Michelin 5* food with a mixture of people on holiday and paid staff. 

When people find vegan food does not seem to suit them;
My experience of being vegan or being mostly vegan is feel very good on it, the more strict I am about it, lethargy after a meat meal does not happen.  But in the discussion, some people have said they honestly tried, and they have problems.  There are junk food vegans who will expose themselves to the risk of scurvy as much as any meat-eater can.  If you want to live like royalty, you still have to eat your fruit and veg, and the veg is lightly cooked or raw.  As I said above, "Where's the meat" you soon get over that first reaction in any case, nuts and seeds are better.  It is important to change slowly, introducing vegan things and reducing animal products, but giving your body time to adjust. 

 

Brighton has vegan pubs, restaurants, cafes and supermarkets like this one called Kindly.  Brighton has always led in veganism.  Sunday lunch in the vegan restaurant The Good Grub, Eastbourne.  The Lewes pound protects local work.  Picture Cafe Veg vegan, Lewes. 

Some mothers do not produce milk for their babies or use another mother's milk.  Formula cow's milk is not necessary and can be plain bad with lactose intolerance.  Nut milks risk scurvy, but apparently, Soya Milk is good.  There are a lot of things like this that will concern people, but the truism to eat your fruit and veg but not processed and factory food is generally good, and not eating meat is better.  Water salad. raw or lightly cooked, veg, and fruit are essential but there is enough salt and sugar in first world foods anyway. 

Here is a guide which personally I can not endorse as I do not experience the slightest problem anyway with eating vegan, but it looks good; In any case, I do eat no salt, and raw and lightly cooked foods because they are very nice. 

I do eat too much, but unlike my father, it is not always fruit.  Dad would keep eating any fruit until someone made him stop, like anyone does when we see wild berries.  He did it as a boy all through life because he enjoyed it.  My mum, who was also born before World War 2, is Scottish and has a reasonable appetite for root vegetables; consequently and tells me that if she were hungry as a child, she would take a potato, rub the dirt off and eat it. 

What we choose to eat probably overrides our natural instincts.  When I was not too bothered about what I ate, that was up until about 1985, I still found Coca-Cola and McDonald's very horrible, but then I never conformed and went vegetarian when I left home.  In recent years, McDonald's have introduced vegan options, plus their black coffee are the best things on the menu, provided they put the correct item in the box, which the nature of that business they make mistakes. 

With everything, there is the warning of The Military Industrial Complex, an industry grown so powerful that it promotes war and is corrupting.  This can be applied to most things, good science and theoretical science, building theory on theory rather than theoretical science, and developing theory to explain observations.  And very much in food, fortunately UK has the NHS, which tends to moderate bad medicine by comparison with the USA, which is something's should never be largely or solely privately run. 

Sherlock Holmes, The Face of Death - wartime propaganda promising, like many films of that time, better things after the war.  In this case, the rich lady tears up her title to a vast amount of land so that ordinary people can live without fear of losing their homes. 

My parents would spend a lot of time getting me, as a small boy, to eat the meat.  I did not like red meat.  Ordinary people had lots of British vegetables which are now forgotten and discarded as weeds, see the video below. 

 

British Vegetables were abundant but are not recognised now but treated as weeds.

(15 Forgotten Vegetables Medieval Farmers Grew That NEED to Come Back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJnIZiH5fyM)

In Conclusion, it is not companies doing bad things, though some do, but that people and the media could instead cultivate better.  No wars, arms sales, kindness to each other, the environment and in our food.  But I observe the BBC will cover everything but spend much time on promoting the negative during their most popular viewing times. 

I have included personal anecdotes, but they are difficult to argue or to say are coincidences, such as do people with blood group O also get bad headaches or feel mildly lethargic/unwell after eating meat, hence take care with those comparisons of blood types from the superseded study? 

Will you feel better on a vegan diet, yes, but how well or long a life is affected by how we/they compensate following an earlier life health issue and whether they are an empowered, feisty personality, as well as what we eat. 

Related links:

https://www.peta.org/living/food/really-natural-truth-humans-eating-meat/

https://youtu.be/05zhL1YUd8Q

LinkedIn article - not promoting veganism, but a Mediterranean diet.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-what-eat-why-your-diet-matters-brain-mylea-charvat-ph-d-

Anatomy and The Plant-Based Vegan Diet

https://youtu.be/BuJspO5TcsE?si=AuUM6pRlRaCKJWpl

Postscript: The environment. 

Carl Sagan cosmologist, spent a considerable amount of time explaining the science and how understanding was developed from astronomy.  He explains to us and to the US Congress the problems of expanding human consumption and, therefore, climate change.  He co-authored one of the significant studies called TAPPS in the 1980s, some of which used evidence from space exploration of other planets. 

Carl Sagan's TV 1980s series Cosmos is very good and has stood the test of time particularly well because he uses more certain explanations and observations.  That is not to say Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago may be wrong or that biblical creation of the Universe is correct, but that is different it is man-created faith rather than evidence-based based but having faith in peace and kindness is a good strategy.

Since then, we have learnt the biomass is greater in the sea and that the sea has been absorbing 25% more CO2 than it had been, at the cost to shell and coral life among so many other things.  Humans have gone beyond breaking point, but Gaia systems have absorbed more than anticipated and kept us alive but with much broken and lost! 

Wind and solar power now supply greatly more than could have been anticipated.  In 2025, 90% of new energy production are by renewables.  These use a combination of simple rules for placing and assembling, and high technology in their development and savings due to mass production.  Plus, storage using heated bricks is an established technology for storing energy where traditional hydroelectric storage won't meet the needs and demand management which the power supplies have not had traditionally. 

https://www.sgr.org.uk/events/defusing-carbon-bombs-how-do-we-stop-remaining-dangerous-fossil-fuels-being-burned

https://www.sgr.org.uk/projects/climate-change-military-main-outputs

Education and more equitable sharing of wealth should stop population growth. 

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies

?I can not find the TED talk?

Acceptance of dilution of pollution is okay, it is not, but all that can be done having got to where we are and should not have got too.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle_we_can_recycle_plastic

Kindness towards each other, the environment, such as for wild flowers to return to the fields like they used to be in 1961, when I was 2 or 3.  Our culture and the way it works is steered by manipulators who affect enough of us, and our stated view of war is usually that it is bad, but of a specific war, Britain sells arms to is good.  Meat and excessive consumption were good given post World War 2, but have not been treated as enemies consistently, but the government is pressed by the BBC to promote growth, and war, rather than better equality and living within our means.

https://www.ted.com/talks/tshering_tobgay_this_country_isn_t_just_carbon_neutral_it_s_carbon_negative

https://www.ted.com/dubbing/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think

Life on Earth has developed symbiotic and co-operative relationships, so much so that our bodies are mostly not human but are other microbes working cooperatively.  Warnings are shared between animal species, and plants share warnings to anticipate and prevent infection communicated via microfungal filaments.  Humans still act as 19th century belief in red in tooth and claw, but do much worse by using poisons, machines that kill the systems we rely on.  Much of what I have said is 'cliché' that is understood but ignored, so I have chosen to say them again. 

 

V-brunch, a vegan sandwich bar in Sevenoaks. 

Other places that have vegan options or can make a vegan variation include: Kake and Kocktail, Life on High, and Malabar. 

More photos of places to eat